I'm going to start back on this at the weekend. Going to have to take the stick part apart again to widen one of the button holes as it makes the button stick at the moment. While I'm at it I think I'll replace the octagonal gate with the square one as I actually found the octagonal to be really hard to use in games like Street fighter.

Of and I've reinstated the OP

This thread is now the third hit on Google for icade bartop conversion

Probably about £150 though I had an old monitor, 2.1 speaker set and the blackberry already. Most expensive thing was the cabinet which I bought flat packed and pre-cut from Ebay for about £80. If you had the skills and the tools (I had neither) then you could do it for less by just buying MDF and cutting it down. Stick sets were about £15 each (just bought cheapo ones).

As a kid I used to do AD&D game sessions in our garage and you'd be surprised just how little heating you need once you get a few people in even our rather large garage. You could always do away with the need for getting more electrics in by using electric camping lighting and pretty much the most expensive aspect should be having somewhere nice to sit and a nice table for coffee/beer. The hardest part will obviously be the initial clean-up as I don't know about you but after 20 years since I played AD&D the amount of gooseberry fool in my garage is terrifying.Once you have a blank canvas of an empty room I think you'll be pleasantly surprised just how little you need to spend to turn it into a space you can use. Plastering to walls is a good idea but a decent masonry paint would save you a small fortune and at least give you something better to look at than brick.

Well my house is only about 2 years old so the only junk in the garage is stuff from the move that hasn't been sorted yet, but my thinking with that is that if we haven't needed/missed any of the stuff in the garage then it can be binned. Not sure my wife would agree though

We have an entire new bathroom suite in ours ready to be fitted in the house once we can be bothered. We got it at the same time we got the extension which added an extra bathroom and bedroom (The new set is for the original bathroom) and we're just a bit tired of builders being in after a 5 week build for an entire new section of the house going on.That's about 10% of what's in the garage .